In Plato’s dialogue, the Timaeus, we are presented with the theory that the cosmos is constructed out of right triangles.
This proposal Timaeus makes after reminding his audience [49Bff] that earlier theories that posited “water” (proposed by Thales), or “air” (proposed by Anaximenes), or “fire” (proposed by Heraclitus) as the original stuff from which the whole cosmos was created ran into an objection: if our world is full of these divergent appearances, how could we identify any one of these candidates as the basic stuff? For if there is fire at the stove, liquid in my cup, breathable invisible air, and temples made of hard stone — and they are all basically only one fundamental stuff — how are we to decide among them which is most basic?
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